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Monday, 29 July 2013

Book love

Each month I chat about what books I've been reading in my monthly Book Love feature.

The Crane Wife - Patrick Ness
Oh dear. I had such HUGE expectations for this book - I am utterly in love with Patrick Ness' Chaos Walkingtrilogy, and was so excited to begin his newest work. But it just fell flat. It's a story that retells a Japanese folk tale in a normal (fairly boring) world. There are very beautiful passages (he is a brilliant writer after all), but I just did not care about the main characters at ALL, and a lot of it felt like he was trying very hard to say very clever things, without actually succeeding. Wah!

E. E. Cummings - Selected Poems 1923 - 1958
Beautiful, quirky, lovely poetry. It somehow manages to both be simple and easy enough to dip into every now and again, and deep enough to catch your breath and give a little more sense to the world. If poetry just brings back memories of dire days over-analysing classic works in school, I hugely recommend looking out ee cummings - you won't regret it.